San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico — Every weekday morning, children at an Islamic school in this city sit cross-legged at low desks and rock in time as they recite the Quran in Arabic.

The older girls’ heads are wrapped in obligatory scarves, and all the children are required to leave their shoes at the door.

But this isn’t Pakistan, Iran or an Arab state.

This Islamic ”madrasa” is part of a small but growing community of several hundred Muslim converts in San Cristobal de las Casas, a Mexican tourist community in southern Chiapas state better known as the
gateway to this region’s modern Maya Indian culture.

The new adherents to Islam in Chiapas are almost all Maya who were once Protestants, a choice that made their families renegades for several previous decades in many Catholic indigenous communities.
And curiously, the proselytizers are Spanish converts who arrived in 1995 and hail from the southern province of Granada, the last stronghold of the Muslim Moors of Spain before their defeat by Christian soldiers in 1492.

With about 40 families in their fold now, the Spanish missionaries and their Indian followers envision spreading their movement to the rest of Latin America.

The irony of the Spanish involvement is not lost on the Maya. But the converts say they’ve embraced Islam as deliverance from cultural oppression that began with the Spanish Conquest of the 1500s.

”Five hundred years ago, they came to destroy us. Five hundred years later, other Spaniards came to return a knowledge that was taken away from us,” said Anastasio Gomez Gomez, a 21-year-old Maya who now calls himself Ibrahim.

He sees no contradiction in being a Muslim and an Indian.[…]

With funding they say comes from philanthropists in Arab states and other Muslim nations, Perez’s mission in just six years has built housing for members, the madrasa — which the government hasn’t yet accredited — a small mosque and a carpentry shop where some of the Maya male converts work.[…]

The missionaries don’t draw attention to it, but the community is tied to the 30-year-old Murabitun international Sufi Islamic movement, whose leader is a controversial Scot named Ian Dallas, now known as Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

Dallas, who is in his 60s, has been eviscerated in the Scottish press, which reported that he produced tracts and speeches considered anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler.[…]

Followers of Islam probably number in the low thousands in Mexico, whether they were born into the religion from Arab immigrant families or converted.

Anastasio Gomez, or Ibrahim, said he had only heard about Islam from watching news reports about the Persian Gulf War.[…]

Gomez converted to Islam after his father threw him out of the house in San Cristobal de las Casas for failing to read his Bible, and he was introduced to the Spaniards.

Gomez’s father, Manuel Gomez, had become a Protestant in the early 1970s and was expelled from his native town, Chamula, just outside San Cristobal de las Casas.

Over the years, tens of thousands of Protestant Maya from Chamula have also been expelled by leaders who run their own quasi-Catholic church.

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